Cultivate Your Writing Practice

melbourne

Cultivate Your Writing Practice

w/ Peggy Frew

No matter if you are a multi-published author in the grip of writer’s block or a novice writer looking for an engaging and sustainable digital detox, this in-person, screen-free course is a great way to find pleasure in creative practice and learn how to integrate writing into everyday life.

Thursdays 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm (AEDT), 15 October 2026 – 3 December 2026

Allen & Unwin – Melbourne

Allen & Unwin – Melbourne
7/232 Victoria Parade
East Melbourne VIC 3002

Get directions

All abilities

$900 or $765 (alumni)

$800 or $680 (alumni) with early bird discount

Book Now

Cultivate Your Writing Practice with Peggy Frew is an eight-week in-person writing course in Melbourne presented by Faber Writing Academy.

In Cultivate Your Writing Practice, prize-winning author and musician Peggy Frew will help you carve out space in your everyday life for embodied, regular writing. Through experiments in free writing and writing to constraints, prompts and provocations, she will guide you through multiple ways to play on the page, deepen your focus, and help you tap hidden or dormant wellsprings of inspiration, helping you to reconnect with the concerns you’d like to take into your writing, and return to the day-to-day machinations of your life recharged, with creativity flowing.

Designed for writers of all genres and experience levels, Cultivate Your Writing Practice is a weekly holiday away from phones, screens, and outcome-focused projects, in the comfortable surrounds of Allen & Unwin’s brand new Naarm/Melbourne offices.

In this course you will:

Meet for weekly, in-person, practice-led writing sessions in a class of no more than 12 students.
Be introduced to a range of creative approaches to keep you writing regularly, and with pleasure.
Connect with fellow committed writers, building a close-knit community of trusted readers.
Be introduced to Writing a Novel (online) tutor Peggy Frew, ahead of the 2027 intake.

Writers you'll be working with:

Peggy Frew

Peggy Frew is a writer and musician who lives in Narrm/Melbourne. Her work has been published in The Age, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, Qantas Magazine, NGV Magazine, The Griffith Review and The Big Issue. She was the winner of The Age short story competition in 2008. Her first novel, House of Sticks, won the Victorian…

Course outline

This course consists of 8 x Thursday evening sessions from 6:30pm – 8:30pm AEDT.

Session 1: Thursday, 15 October
Opening up
In this introductory session, we recall the moments in our lives when creative flow has come easily, and identify the obstacles that now stand in the way.

Session 2: Thursday, 22 October
Stitching notes together
For many of us, we have to snatch writing time between family and work obligations. This can mean we’re always putting off writing until we have a large chunk of time which constantly eludes us. This week we will discuss how to use little slivers of time in pleasurable ways that can support a long-term writing practice.

Session 3: Thursday, 29 October
Finding flow & making mistakes
By permitting ourselves to make mistakes, we often stumble on happy accidents and little surprises that egg us on. This week, we experiment with free-writing exercises to help free us from the fear of our inner critics.

Session 4: Thursday, 5 November
Writing from constraints
What if you had to write an entire novel without using the letter e? What if you edited your poem so that every line could only hold four syllables each? Far from shutting down our imaginations, many writers find working to limitations free them up.

Session 5: Thursday, 12 November
Cross-pollination
In this session we look at the tradition of ekphrastic writing, in which creative writing finds its inspiration in visual art. We look at and take apart some examples of this form of writing, and experiment with it ourselves.

Session 6: Thursday, 19 November
Cut & paste
Kathy Acker and David Bowie are just two creators who divined new work out of rearranged scraps of the old. This week, we experiment with similar approaches to our own work and the published work of others.

Session 7: Thursday, 26 November
Drilling deeper
We’ve played with ways to open ourselves up to new approaches to creating new work, this week, guided by a series of questions from your tutor, you will drill deeper into the themes and preoccupations that you want to bring to your own writing.

Session 8: Thursday, 3 December
A life’s work
For our final session, we take stock of our developing practices with a view to longevity, flexibility and integrity. How have other writers maintained and evolved a practice over a lifetime? How can we do the same?

The exact course content could be adjusted according to the experience and concerns of the group. The detail of the course is at the discretion of the Course Director and Faber Writing Academy at Allen & Unwin.

Praise for this course

This is the inaugural iteration of Cultivate Your Writing Practice.

How to Book

To secure your place in Cultivate Your Writing Practice, please pay now.

You will be eligible for an early bird discount of $100 when you make your payment by 31 August.

If you choose to pay by instalments, you may do so via Zip Money on a schedule that suits you. Use your Zip account or sign up at checkout.

Please see our terms and conditions for more information.